They turned off the internet. Cut phone lines, too. So that they could kill in the dark, it is said. For more than two weeks now, Iranians have been plunged into silence, severed from the rest of the world in the midst of what are arguably the most consequential anti-government protests since the 1979 revolution. Only now, as some manage to episodically reconnect, are we beginning to grasp the extent of the violence meted out against those who took to the streets. Mass arrests. Incommunicado detentions. Accounts of people being shot in the eyes and head. Body bags piling up in morgues. “We were walking in blood,” says one emergency room doctor treating the wounded. Meanwhile, the communications blackout continues.

On Tuesday, we got through to one young man in Tehran through a shaky WhatsApp connection. When the protests began in late December, he was fulfilling his compulsory military service. As it happens, he had reached out to us months before, eager to talk about the peculiarities of Iranian political life. He typed the words below, his own assessment of the situation, the line between hope and despair, and the long zigzagging arc of change, into his phone.

We publish his text as reports emerge that several major airlines have cancelled their flights to the region, presumably in light of Trump’s announcement that a military “armada” is headed to Iran. To be Iranian today is to engage in a punishing waiting game.

I must begin with a condition rather than a confession: my safety, anonymity and physical survival come first. In Iran, where words can still wound the body, this text is written cautiously, stripped of names and coordinates – anything that could invite harm. What follows is not testimony in the juridical sense, nor reportage. It is a personal record: fragile, partial, and deliberately inward. This is not about who I am in an administrative sense, but about where I stand.

I am a young man in Tehran. I come from an upper-middle-class family, one that has long been politically aware and historically engaged. Politics, literature and debate were not abstractions when I was growing up; they were part of the household atmosphere. I studied literature and political science, and over the years I’ve worked in and around writing, translation and what might loosely be called intellectual labour.

At the same time, I’ve been wary of becoming a detached, insulated intellectual – someone who speaks about society without being inside of it. I’ve made a conscious effort to stay in contact with everyday life: with the bazaar, ordinary economic anxieties, people whose political language is not theoretical but practical, immediate and raw.

Temperamentally, I’m cold in politics – not indifferent, but restrained. I try to think, as Gramsci advised, with pessimism of the intellect rather than optimism of the will. Following Spengler, I’m wary of optimism; I see excessive hope as a form of evasion, sometimes even as cowardice. This disposition is shaped by Iran, my family’s history, the region we live in, and a long familiarity with disappointment that repeats itself in different costumes.

At the end of the 12-day war last June, Iranian society was shocked and withdrawn, closed in on itself. The moment of paralysis didn’t last long. Political and economic decisions made shortly afterward reopened the wound. The state moved toward price liberalisation and a unification of exchange rates. Inflation skyrocketed and ordinary people paid the price. These decisions were the immediate trigger for the protests that began late last month.

In the earliest days, violence was limited. There were, of course, exceptions, particularly in smaller towns already strained by poverty and neglect, where anger spilled over more quickly into confrontation. But in Tehran and many larger cities, the protests initially remained restrained.

That restraint didn’t last long. Once Reza Pahlavi, the son of the deposed Shah, entered and hijacked the moment, the dynamic shifted. The atmosphere hardened. Polarization intensified. Repression escalated. What had been tense but contained became openly violent and unforgiving.

Throughout this period, I tried – imperfectly – to maintain an analytical distance. My assessment is bleak but sober: the situation is one of near-total impasse. Without decisive external intervention – particularly from the US – nothing structural will change. But such intervention won’t produce immediate transformation. The equations would shift, yes, but slowly, and unevenly. There will be no single day of resolution, no cinematic collapse.

At the same time, I understand why so many Iranians are overtaken by emotion and the pull of collective momentum. Why so many Iranians are calling for help. When life becomes unbearable, affect fills the space where strategy should be. What I resist is not feeling but illusion.

Living in Iran today feels like inhabiting a paradox stretched over time. The protests of 2025 and 2026 didn’t arrive as discrete events; they seeped into daily life, saturating it slowly, until even silence felt politically charged. Nothing truly “began,” and nothing ever clearly “ended.” What we call unrest here isn’t a storm – it’s a climate.

Last Thursday and Friday marked one of those rare moments when the climate condensed into something unmistakable. Across Iran, confrontation was deep and widespread. The streets carried a different density. I was at home but I could feel it, the way you feel pressure before an earthquake. It reminded me of the atmosphere before the bloody crackdown we call Aban 1398, in 2019, when a 300% increase in fuel prices sparked nationwide protests.

This time, phones buzzed less with information than with fragments: rumours, warnings, half-sent messages that failed to deliver. Sirens, shouting, the dull thud of something breaking – none of it fully visible, all of it fully present. Relatives, friends of friends, were detained or threatened. Through a more tangled web I heard of people who left to never return. On the official broadcaster, IRIB, the narrative was already being woven, with talk of “rioters” and “seditionists,” framing the tragedy in the cold, formal language of the state.

And then, just as suddenly, it stopped.

By Saturday morning, it was as though someone had turned a key. Shops reopened. Schools resumed. Traffic reasserted its old rhythms. Faces rearranged themselves into neutrality. The streets didn’t look defeated; they looked instructed. Calm returned – as a kind of enforced amnesia.

What didn’t return was the internet. We moved again through public space, but severed from one another. You could see people, but you couldn’t reach them as you normally do. A society reassembled physically while remaining digitally amputated.

This is perhaps the most exhausting aspect of life here. One day, everything feels on the brink of rupture; the next, the same streets pretend nothing has happened. The body remembers what the surface denies. You carry Thursday and Friday inside you while acting on Saturday.

Daily life has, in a technical sense, returned to “normal.” But normality here is a brittle thing. It rests on interruption: at any moment, access can be cut, movement restricted, language punished. Everyone is waiting – not for revolution, not even for change – but simply for the internet to come back, as if connectivity itself were a form of oxygen. Waiting has become the dominant political posture.

What strikes me most, looking back at both the long arc of the 2025–2026 protests and these recent days, is how thoroughly politics has migrated to the interior. The streets matter, of course. But what endures is what happens after the streets empty: the recalibration of fear, the small private negotiations with conscience, the decision each morning about how visible one can afford to be.

This is not despair, exactly. It’s something quieter and more difficult to name. A kind of suspended agency. Life continues, but always with an asterisk. Always with the knowledge that what feels ordinary today may be impossible tomorrow.

Alongside the exhaustion and the forced return to routine, another feeling has been quietly circulating: a sense of betrayal. A feeling that promises were made somewhere – vaguely, loudly, irresponsibly – and then quietly withdrawn.

Some people speak, almost in disbelief, about Trump. About how help was implied, suggested, performatively announced – and then never came. The disappointment here is not about foreign policy as such; it’s about the psychic damage of expectation. To be encouraged, even indirectly, to hope – and then to be left alone with the consequences of that hope.

Others direct this sense of abandonment inward, toward figures who claimed symbolic leadership. There’s anger toward Reza Pahlavi: that people spilled into the streets in heeding his calls, only to be exposed and then disowned.

For some, despite this bitterness, hope has not disappeared; it has simply been reconfigured: history will turn, the fall is inevitable, justice will arrive – if not now, then imminently. The Shia moral imagination, long practiced in waiting, endurance, and deferred redemption, has not vanished. It has merely changed costume.

What unsettles many inside Iran is not only the regime or the repression, but the spectacle unfolding beyond the borders. The behaviour of the opposition abroad, and of the Iranian diaspora more broadly, has taken on an almost manic quality. There’s a sense of disconnection so severe that it borders on hallucination: maximalist rhetoric untethered from lived reality, feverish certainty detached from consequence.

From inside the country, this external discourse often feels less like solidarity and more like noise. Or worse, like projection. A politics of fantasy, conducted at a safe distance, treating those still here as symbols rather than living breathing bodies. For many of us, this is perhaps the most alienating realisation of all: that the loudest voices claiming to speak for Iran often seem unable – or unwilling – to listen to it.

What makes this moment even more fragile and tragic is the historical vacuum in which it’s unfolding. A society cannot improvise political maturity overnight. Ours was not educated into it. For more than four decades, political understanding wasn’t merely neglected but actively deformed – flattened by propaganda, ritualised slogans, and a deliberate erosion of historical memory. What remained was not consciousness but reflex.

In such conditions, it was almost inevitable that external forces would learn to speak into that emptiness. Opposition figures abroad, foreign media ecosystems, and openly Zionist narratives didn’t create the confusion – they recognised it, amplified it, and learned how to inhabit it. They worked with the raw material available: grievance without grounding, anger without orientation, hope without discipline.

Out of this vacuum emerged a strangely seductive nostalgia machine. Exile satellite channels like Manoto didn’t merely revisit the past; they curated it, aestheticised it, bleached it of contradiction. The Pahlavi era was rendered not as history but atmosphere: a mood board of elegance, order and imagined dignity. Structural violence disappeared. Class repression dissolved. Authoritarianism became etiquette.

Gradually, a story took hold: that everything was once fine, even good; that the catastrophe began in 1979; that betrayal – not history, power, or global forces – was the original sin. The revolution was reduced to a moral failure, rather than a political rupture shaped by its time.

At the same time, inside the country, politics itself was hollowed out. Stripped of theory, history, and language. Generations grew up knowing neither how change actually happens nor how long it takes nor what it costs. Protest became imagined as an event rather than a process – something one enters briefly and then exits victorious.

This is how the fantasy took hold: that two days in the streets would be enough, and that sheer presence would substitute for organisation. There was little understanding of endurance, attrition, the long, grinding temporality of struggle.

Perhaps most devastating is the absence of collective memory. Decades of struggle – labour movements, student organising, women’s resistance, ethnic and regional uprisings – were never systematically recorded, transmitted or reflected upon. Experiences were lived, paid for and then lost. Lessons dissolved with each wave of repression. There was no archive of failure, no inheritance of strategy.

Each generation began again from zero, armed only with slogans and hope, unaware of how often those same slogans had already been tested and broken. What was missing was not bravery but sediment – the slow accumulation of knowledge.

The result is political defeat and cognitive disorientation. A society exhausted by repetition, shocked by its own vulnerability, and stunned by how easily its desires could be narrated by others. When politics lacks depth, spectacle rushes in. When history is erased, myth rushes in. When education fails, fantasy becomes governance.

What we are living through now is not just the aftermath of repression or the failure of protest. It’s the exposure of a long, accumulated absence of political literacy, historical continuity, and shared reflection. Until that absence is confronted, every eruption will risk collapsing back into the same stunned quiet, leaving behind only more disappointment, nostalgia and ghosts.

As of today, Internet access remains unstable. VPNs circulate on the black market like contraband medicine: overpriced, unreliable, constantly expiring. Some people travel to the edges of the country just to catch a signal strong enough to send a single message, upload files, reassure relatives that they’re still alive. Privilege is now measured in bandwidth.

All of this unfolds at the worst possible time. The end of the Persian year approaches–a season associated with closure, renewal and fragile hope, but now arriving weighted with debt. Checks due. Rent overdue. Salaries hollowed out by inflation. Prices change faster than language can register. Political despair is inseparable from material pressure. You cannot ask people to be heroic when they are busy surviving.

Beneath all of this is a grief so widespread it has become almost invisible. Nearly every family now carries a loss – a dead son, a detained daughter, a brother who never came back the same. Prison is no longer an exception; it’s part of the social fabric. Mourning is no longer public; it’s quietly distributed, house by house.

This, too, is painfully familiar. My own family lived through this in the 1980s – the hard decade after the revolution. We know this grammar of fear: the way entire lives are reorganised around absence. What is unbearable now is not that it’s happening again – but that it is happening everywhere, at once and with fewer illusions left to soften the blow.

If there‘s a final feeling that governs this moment, it’s not hope or despair, but something quieter and heavier: disillusionment without collapse. A population still standing, still functioning, but no longer believing in shortcuts, saviors, or sudden turns of history. Faith – both religious and secular – has thinned.

This is what it feels like now. To live inside pressure. To carry memory forward when the present refuses to settle. To recognise, painfully, that what once seemed exceptional has become ordinary – and that ordinariness itself is the wound.

If this journal has any purpose, it’s to insist that this moment be seen not as a failure of courage, but as the accumulated consequence of history, neglect, repression and exhaustion. People here are not passive. They are spent.

And still, they live.

That, perhaps, is the final fact.